The Search for an Overarching Worldview in Africa
The real religious fault-line in Africa is not between Muslims and Christians. It is between believers and those who chose to live as if God does not exist.
(Reading time: about 11 minutes.)
The Real “Religious Divide”
Which are the predominant worldviews contending for the minds and hearts of contemporary Africans? Which meta-ideas do most Africans subscribe to? Do we have a Weltanschauung? Weltanschauung, a word first used by German Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) is the German word from which the English word “world-view” was derived. A worldview is inevitable. Everyone looks at the world through a certain lens or framework and, conversely, everyone is looked at through someone else’s lenses. A Weltanschauung normally includes an individual’s or a people’s natural philosophy, their existential and normative postulates as well as their ethical and religious orientations.
A Pew Forum survey done in 2010 found out that there were some 11 million Muslims in Africa in 1900; now they number 234 million - a more than 20-fold increase. Christians were then 7 million, and now, at 470 million, they have grown by almost 70 times. More than one-fifth of all Christians are to be found in Africa, and 15 per cent of all Muslims. The total population of sub-Saharan Africa at the time of the study was around 820 million. It is now estimated to be at 1.2 billion.
Statistics are always helpful. The key is how to interpret them. One may also say that the key lies in the worldview of the interpreter. Some, for instance, use such statistics to pit Christians against Muslims. They claim that religious fault-lines in various regions of Africa tend to put Christians under mounting pressure from Muslims to convert. They could use such statistics to explain away the spats of violence in northern Nigeria and southern Sudan and the conflicts in large swathes of central and southern Africa.
Others will use such statistics to swing the religious-debate pendulum completely to the other side. Maybe religion is the reason for hope? Perhaps the overwhelming presence of these two “foreign” religions, i.e., over and above our traditional African religions, is the reason we have progressed from the stone age. They claim, in fact, that Christian-Muslim relationships in Africa have always been marked by respect and tolerance and that we could even provide a lesson for other parts of the world.
It is true that Christians and Muslims in Africa have almost always learnt how to tolerate each other much better than they do in Europe. The sharper divide in Europe could be because the typical Muslim has a serious problem with the secularist’s radical emancipation from God – “secularism” understood here as a lack of belief in transcendence. Viewed from this perspective, it can be said that the real religious fault-line in Africa is not between Muslims and Christians. It is between believers and those who chose to live as if God does not exist.
Full-blown secularism has never really settled into the African’s DNA. As a people, Africans tend to be firmly embedded in their tribes or groups, wherein the common weal is more important than the well-being of the individual. The community determines the individual’s values and social orientation. On the negative side, this also explains the perennial tribal confrontations we are so used to in our political debates.
The American theologian Brian Abshire expressed this idea as follows:
The problems facing modern Africa are due to the effects of paganism. Africa has a thin layer of Western materialism covering millennia of pagan philosophy. The endemic poverty, sickness, tribal warfare, etc., can be attributed to the paganism which continues to operate. The problem is not race but religion. (Abshire, 2009)
I would agree with Abshire for the most part, as long as that tendentious word “paganism” is not equated with secularism or atheism or occultism. Paganism is the religion of the natural man before the dawn of revealed religion. And natural religion, in so far as it is a yearning for transcendence, retains in itself, some natural goodness.
In God or Nothing, Cardinal Robert Sarah phrases a related point as follows:
As part of its identity, Africa is open to transcendence, to adoration and to the glory of God. The African peoples respect human life, but they look beyond it by seeking eternity. The soul of Africa is always open toward God. Unlike a large part of the West, this continent has a fundamentally theocentric vision. Material concerns are always secondary. In this life, the African knows that he is only a sojourner.
Unlike the typical atheism of the modern secularist, Islam, Christianity and most African traditional religions still believe in God, in community, in sin, in purification, in grace, the afterlife, etc. We affirm all these realities, and we are not afraid to mention these words in public discourse.
Islam Confronting Secularism
A person’s attitude towards life can be gleaned from their attitude towards death. The secular humanist, for instance, will never understand the courage of a Muslim to defy death. A nihilist cannot face death with such ‘reckless abandon’. It takes some form of superhuman courage to approach death the way a jihadist Muslim does. It takes only cowardice to deny life the way our typical suicidal maniacs do. Courage is the power to face life head on. Cowardice is the impotence that recoils from facing up to the mystery that life is. One is an act of affirmation; the other, an act of denial.
When a devout Muslim hears self-proclaimed atheists like Christopher Hitchens making declarations such as “‘god’ is not great” (Ref. The God Delusion), our Muslim simply cannot understand how anyone in their right mind would make such a ludicrous statement… and that is why he responds with a thunderous Allah U-akbar! God IS great! The Islamic, Christian, and Traditional African religions have not lost their sense of the proper ontological structure of reality wherein God must be at the top of the hierarchy if everything is to hold together. The secularist has lost this sense. He has lost the fundamental openness of man to the divine.
The kind of self-immolation that the terrorist engages in cannot be carried out by the feeble-hearted. The courage to be ready to lay down one’s life for something greater than oneself cannot but be supernatural. The kind of lives they live, governed by principles that transcend them, seem more admirable and authentic than the lives of those who limit their scope to this world alone. Do they inspire terror? Definitely! And perhaps that is their hope and their desire. They harbour within themselves an inarticulate awareness that perhaps the only means left to wake up these poor slumbering secularists from their deathly sleep is a fear – a holy fear – like that of the jihadist.
The secular humanist is not free from the world – and he can somehow sense it. He senses it because he strongly believes that this world or this present age (saecula in Latin) is all he has. If nothing transcends the here and now, the tendency towards nihilism is nigh impossible to avoid. The Muslim on the other hand, is free from the world – and boldly so. He is so free from it he does not mind leaving it for a better one. He is so ready to affirm the greatness of God that he counts his self-immolation a small price to pay. The fervent Muslim would rather kill himself (and by extension his neighbour) than “kill” God, the one who IS. From this point of view, Muslims are as distant from secularists as the East is from the West. When a fundamentalist blows himself to pieces, he’s making one of the boldest statements known to man. He is saying, ‘To Be is better than not to be!’ He is affirming a type of life or way of being that can only get its full meaning from the ultimate source of life and being, namely, God. He is deliberately and violently rebelling against the cheap, godless type of life he can perceive in the secularist. He is affirming his belief in an afterlife which, in his religious worldview, is infinitely better than the dark prison that surrounds him when he moves into a rabidly secular environment.
A Second “Religious Divide”
On the negative side, it can be said that the Muslim has been able to overcome apathy with fervour, but he has not found a way to prevent his fervour from boiling over into violence. He is not free from strong human emotions like violence, hatred, and the desire for destruction. What is the secret of overcoming violence with peace, hatred with love, destructive power with a creative one? How do we contain nuclear reactors like the ones in Chernobyl without letting the energy leak out and cause havoc?
The Christian narrative tries to answer this conundrum by introducing us to the figure of a man who claimed to hold within himself such polar opposites. He held them together not using a formula or an algorithm, but in himself, as a person. In terms of exuding fervour or exercising his zeal for things related to God, this man (who was also God and who, therefore, had more power than all the nuclear reactors of the world put together) could have chosen, with a snap of his fingers if he wanted, to set the world ablaze (he was actually requested to do this on some occasions) - but he didn’t. How such power was contained within a small baby or in the womb of a woman without ripping them into shreds is both mind-boggling and overwhelming, to say the least. More still, he contained within himself all the power in the universe, yet chose to keep it under wraps for around 30 out of the 33 years he spent on this earth. When he eventually emerged from his silence, this power was revealed in signs and miracles – the most powerful miracles, of course, being those of bringing people back from death. Anyone who has a key to the riddle of death is an instant hero for us mortals. All things we fear, death is the first. So new and confusing was this mystery of the God-Man, his own people – and later, the Muslims – rejected it/him. On this front, there does exist a religious fault-line between Christians and Muslims. It is not about there being a God or not. It is about the qualities of the God who IS.
Christianity and the African Worldview
What of Africans? How have we reacted to the story of the God-Man?
During the centuries in which the Christian message has been introduced into the African continent, it seems to have endeared itself to the African psyche more than any other religious meta-narrative. Again, some will use such data to support the claim that this is just another sign that, of all historical peoples, Africans are the most gullible, most childish, most desperate for a consoling story, most uncultured, the laziest, and the most intellectually underdeveloped. Others still will say: “Perhaps these are the kind of people the God-Man especially came for? After all, why would the one who has within himself all-power, not be able to encompass all people?”
The view of Africa as a land of childhood, removed from self-consciousness, wrapped in darkness, uncultivated, was not only taught by Enlightenment thinkers like Hegel, but picked up by anthropologists like Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), a French scholar trained in philosophy and who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology. Lévy said:
[The] African’s primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality but uses "mystical participation" to manipulate the world. The primitive mind does not address contradictions especially because they have little or no acquaintances with scientific institutions. African societies are pre-scientific. They operate collectively and mystically. They often introduce unrelated and irrelevant factors into explanations of experience.
The anthropologist and ethnologist, Prof J.S. Malan, wrote:
Africa is to a large extent still caught up in its traditional cosmology based on psychical thinking. Ancestral spirits and magical powers manipulated by medicine men and sorcerers are regarded as the most important agents of causation, hence the predominantly fatalistic outlook on life... Even despite extensive Christianization, most of these ideas still prevail. (Malan, 1999)
All these perspectives have their merits and, rather than complain about being denigrated, it is really up to us as Africans to figure out why we are perceived in certain ways. For instance, it seems to me to be the case that a typical African lives his life synthetically and inductively rather than analytically and deductively. We approach life and morality from the point of view of “what is” here and now, not from the point of view of “what could be” or “what ought to be”. Most of our lives are categorical. As a society, we have not acquired the leisure to be hypothetical. For us, evil as a force is too powerful a reality to decide on scientifically or philosophically. We resigned ourselves a long time ago to the fact that we cannot eliminate it. Does that make us resigned and even lazy when confronted with suffering? Yes, definitely. But at least it does not lead us to the hubris of making us believe we are gods who can solve all the mysteries of the universe with our limited intelligences. We would sooner abandon ourselves to the processes of fate than attempt to understand human misery in our own terms.
What the so-called secular and developed world might call a resigned, childish and lazy attitude towards life and evil in particular, is what we would call humility. It makes us more humane and compassionate. Can we not say, perhaps, that only the one whose existential heart has been opened by suffering, can understand best the story of the God-Man who opened his heart on the Cross to heal the world of its evil?
So which worldview do we subscribe to as Africans and which worldview do you personally subscribe to? You tell me.
References
Article
Abshire, Brian, Dec. 1997, Paganism and Modem Africa, Chalcedon Report, reprinted in The Christian Digest, Nov. 1998.
Book
Sarah, Robert, (Cardinal); God or Nothing, A Conversation on Faith, Ignatius Press (30 Oct. 2015)